Dance Site Do Androids Dance to Merge with Complex

Diplo performs at Billboard Winterfest at Park City Live presented by Citi in partnership with American Airlines and Marshall Headphones on Sunday, Jan. 25, 2015, in Park City, Utah.

Donald Traill/Invision for Billboard/AP Images

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The EDM blog Do Androids Dance today announced that it will shut down after two years. Facebook and Twitter quickly filled with speculation about why the site, and others like it, have gone under recently (Boomrat shut down in the fall just months after it was bought by Live Nation).

Rich Antoniello, the CEO and co-founder of Complex Media which owns Do Androids Dance as well as dozens of other entertainment sites including Pigeons and Planes and HipHopDX, said that while the blog itself will no longer exist, EDM coverage will continue and be "merged" with the company's main online hub, Complex.com.

"EDM is has cross-pollinated with hip hop, it's a lifestyle topic now," he said. "It didn't make sense to keep covering it on this stand-alone, narrow vertical. We wanted that traffic to contribute to Complex. We didn't let anyone go, they're all going to keep writing for us, so it's more of a merger."

Antoniello said the company's web traffic has quadrupaled in the past year, and now hovers around 30 million monthly uniques. Hip hop has long been a successful editorial topic for them, but dance music proved more challenging, he said.

"EDM is an experiential culture, it's about going to shows and maybe revisiting them in a large scale video later," he said. "It's not like hip hop which is about rumors and collaborations and feuds and shopping. People are trying to apply general music standards to electronic muisc, but it's different. It's still compelling, but it's very different."